Saint-Exupery says something self-tranformingly, world-tranformingly true:

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

This is the difference between lust and love. Lust wants to possess another as object. Love wants to be possessed by a We, an emergent superpersonal being summoned by participation in love, which renders those in love participants in someone transcending either.

Where such a superpersonal being comes to live around and between two life partners, there is marriage. Marriage is a spiritual fact, independent of society. A marriage is or isn’t.

Many people have faiths that preclude the possibility of marriage. For those of unmarriageable faith, any wedding is a premature celebration of a union that has not yet happened and may never happen.

Unfaithfulness is a kind of unsanctioned marriage. Some people’s first real marriage occurs outside of and in violation of wedlock.

Nietzsche understood the psychological topology of love, that love is a kind of super-person:

“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘Dans le veritable amour c’est l’ame, qui enveloppe le corps.’ ‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.'”

Much attempted self-love is actually self-lust. And when people condemn self-love, it is actually self-lust that is condemned.

In self-lust we want to possess ourselves as a beloved object.

To achieve self-love we must follow Saint-Exupery’s advice, but with the intuitive factions — what depth psychologists call complexes — and have these aspects of ourselves “look outward together in the same direction.”

This experiencing of the world together within ourselves, this attempt at sensus communis with our estranged and conflicting aspects of ourselves, this is the path to self-respect, inner mutuality — of self-integration.

Each of us is a community of intuitive sup-personal beings, to whom I is transcendent. Only inner-marriage produces a coherent person.

All marriages of all kinds and scales require constant cultivation, repair, growth.

Another beautiful Nietzsche quote:

One must learn to love. — This happens to us in music: first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as a life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it; when we sense that we’d miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music: it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love. We are always rewarded in the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have learned it this way — there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned.

Psychologies that encourage self-reflective observation — taking oneself as something to observe and know about — draw us into self-consuming reflection on the reflector. We gorge on self and starve to death.

A visual warning: